CSotD: Friday Funnies Miscellany
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This Andertoons doesn’t require a lot of explanation, though you have to be old enough to remember giant, air-conditioning-required, tape-driven mainframe computers.
My first major freelance job was working for a company whose entire business was keeping track of oil and gas leases for landowners on one of those behemoths.
I was charged with writing a users manual not for the computer but for the extensive form you filled out which was then input to record the details of your leases.
I assume most owners of oil and gas leases today keep that information in their pockets on their phones.
Even in those Uniblab days, it was apparently not a foolproof business plan. They tried to cut costs by not paying me and we wound up suing each other not because of the amount of money involved but because I wasn’t going to sit on the Porch at the Home remembering the time I let them sumbitches rip me off.
There are, after all, enough unavoidable regrets in life and you don’t need a computer to keep track of them.
I prefer remembering the look on the face of the Big Important Man when he realized his underlings had been lying to him about the quality of my work and that he’d not only have to pay the disputed amount but his lawyers as well.
Those are the memories to take to the Home.
Speaking of the need to feel good about yourself, Between Friends gets into an area that I think is a male/female disconnect, in that the need for reinforcement is considered a weakness in men and isn’t in women.
There’s some song that I keep hearing on store Muzak in which a female singer declares that she feels good about herself and so she doesn’t need anyone else, and then there’s a dance break and then she says it again, gosub 10.
For men, by contrast, there’s an understanding that those with true power are like Clark Kent or Kwai Chang Caine in “Kung Fu,” and that, if you have to tell people you’re cool, you aren’t.
We’ve also exchanged bad history for other bad history such that, as I read the current theory, NASA in the early 60s consisted of a whole lot of white cis men wandering around doing nothing while a handful of AA women ran the entire space program on their own.
It’s good and right to finally acknowledge that they were critical team members, but let’s not simply exchange bullshit for cowshit.
I’d rather see inclusive, accurate history seamlessly integrated into our awareness. Yesterday I wrote an explainer for kids about impeachment with the backgrounder that Ben Franklin borrowed the idea from the Iroquois, and that it was the clan mothers in that matriarchal society who had the power to remove officials from office.
I didn’t break it out separately. I just mentioned it because, yeah, that’s where it came from.
That’s not just 18th Century history, either. Spend about five minutes in a contemporary Iroquois community and you realize that the dominance of women is such a given that I’m pretty sure they feel no need to reinforce their self-image.
At least until they step outside into mainstream society.
(I may have just answered my own question as well as Susan’s.)
There’s a lot of Calvin in Wallace the Brave, but he’s more self-aware, as seen in this Sunday strip in which he purposely prepares Spud for a night of sleepless terror.
I think when Calvin did things like that, he half-believed it himself. Wallace seems to clearly be making this up to traumatize poor Spud.
Which reminds me of a time when I was out camping with my boys, who insisted on a ghost story.
So I told them the Golden Arm, an old tale about a fellow whose car breaks down at night and who ends up helping a man row across a lake, dig up his dead wife and retrieve her artificial arm, which was made of gold. And for which her ghost follows them back across the lake and into the house.
I’ve had to apologize to them about every three years when the subject comes up again because the story genuinely terrified them.
Hey, I was only trying to be entertaining, and they did ask for a ghost story.
(I suppose the fact that I told the story in first-person contributed to its impact. Also the fact that the only structure on the wooded shores of the isolated lake where we were camped was a small, stone mausoleum.)
Quick takes
Tank McNamara makes fun of baseball’s obsession with stats, but it’s already ruined all appreciation of that sport, so wotthehell.
However, they’ve now begun turning JUGS guns on NFL runningbacks under the apparent delusion that it is foot speed, rather than instinct, cuts and general elusiveness (see note,below) , that makes them great.
Stop it right now.
The worms in this Rubes are hardly the only primitive, tiny-brained creatures who are under the impression that all of New York State is The Big Apple.
Newscasters use the term “Upstate New York” to helpfully pin down the location of incidents which occur somewhere in the 99.5% of New York which is not Gotham.
Permit me to offer this futile attempt … oh, to hell with it.
Juxtaposition of Dad Jokes
(Buckets)
Fathers are so often the butt of the joke on the comics page that it’s nice to see some gags which feature them in semi-intelligent mode.
I may re-use that second observation. Thank god my kids are too old for me to need the first one.
Or at least, they’re not living here for me to have to fret over it.
Language notes
South Africa has 10 official languages, and, as Madam & Eve notes, any number of them may interweave in a single sentence.
A friend of mine wrote a brilliant, fascinating book about the serious cultural conflicts there, or you can simply enjoy one of the old songs that, back in the apartheid days, got Jeremy Taylor banned from broadcast.
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